Posted by We all know what upgrades mean. Installation…Configuration…Patching…Testing…Deployment…Change approvals…Meetings…Long hours…Perhaps pulling an “overnighter” but hopefully never having to enact the dreaded “Backout Plan”.
Or…. that stuff can “just happen” without you worrying about it at all!
I logged on to my Exadata Cloud Express database on the weekend, and lo and behold, it is not Oracle Database 12c anymore. It is 12c Release 2 !
A look back through my email Inbox, and I saw that I had indeed been notified of the upcoming upgrade some time ago, but I was too lazy to pay attention to it 
Now that’s the kind of upgrade I like !
Learning is not a spectator sport 
… and scott/tiger works out of the box – cool, all tests passed !
*All* the best apps work best in the scott/tiger schema 🙂
All jokes aside however, you need to remmeber the positioning of Exadata Cloud Express. Your typical use case here is someone or some businsess who use (say) Oracle XE. So whereas with XE they got a free database, they had
– no patches
– no security updates
– no (automated) backup/recovery
– no enterprise edition features
and they are most likely not equipped with staff to manage the database.
So like any consumer service (lawn mowing, cleaning, etc) you pay a small fee and someone does all the heavy lifting for you.